REVIEW : Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 (PS5)
Aside from the clumsy title, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 gets right to the fun stuff. You’re prowling the desert of Kuamar, sneaking your way to the first overlook point, after a briefing that explains your motivations and a quickfire training mission that teaches you the principles of sniping. Is it time for the first stealth kill? Perhaps 15 minutes. Is it time for the first sniper kill? Also, depending on your approach, 15 minutes. Within 30 minutes, you’re poised on a clifftop, surveying a container port over a kilometre away. You will never physically visit this port, but your presence will be felt there, particularly in the cranial region.
Developer CI Games clearly understands the experience it’s after, having steadily perfected Ghost Warrior across five games, and Contracts 2 delivers it with calm assurance. You’re Raven, a skilled assassin hired to prevent a conflict in the Middle Eastern state of Kuamar. Your objective is Bibi Rashida, Kuamar’s de-facto ruler after her husband, the president, was slain by a neighbouring country. Rashida’s planned military reaction has the potential to destabilise the region, inflate oil prices, and cripple Western economies. Your mission is to bring down the regime by eliminating Rashida’s associates, which include rogue hackers and disgraced SAS troops, before eliminating Rashida herself.
Your efforts to destabilise Rashida’s regime are divided into five missions. This may not seem like much, but the objectives in Contracts 2 are massive. They’re so large that they’re referred to as “Regions” in-game, which is a fair assessment. Each Region is a vast expanse of painstakingly designed terrain with different objectives and numerous paths between them. In any other game, some of the locales you visit, such as a massive mediaeval fortress with both an inner and outer fort, would constitute the whole level.
The missions in Contracts 2 are separated into two types. “Classic” contracts are familiar infiltration jobs in which you physically sneak into locations to assassinate targets and sabotage equipment using a combination of shooting and stealth. However, new to Contracts 2 is “Long Shot” contracts. These entail sneaking past guard patrols to reach specified Overlook positions, lofty vantage points from which you may snipe at targets over a kilometre distant.
Contracts 2’s puzzle-like structure puts it above the level of a mere head-popping simulator. The design certainly takes inspiration from IO’s latest Hitman trilogy. These contracts, like Hitman, are designed with replayability in mind. Each mission includes its own set of challenges, such as killing targets in various ways, completing ten kills within a specific distance, and killing ten counter-snipers with melee sneak assaults.
Success in a challenge earns you extra money to spend on new weapons, weapon upgrades, and gadgets. The latter consists of a reconnaissance drone and an automated sniping-turret designed to allow for synchronised kill-shots.
While long shot missions are the game’s most notable new feature, the best mission is actually a standard contract. Mount Kuamar places you on the trail of Rashida’s hacker pal Lars Hellstrom, who has constructed himself a supercomputer located within the Citadel, a strongly guarded concrete bunker. To begin, you must damage the Citadel’s outer communication network, which comprises a giant satellite array and a water pumping facility linked by a vast network of underground tunnels.
It’s classic James Bond fare, a delight from start to end.
Contracts 2’s mix of classic and long-shot missions helps to solve a problem that Ghost Warrior has had for a time. Sniping can become monotonous quickly, but physically penetrating facilities is the polar opposite of how a sniper functions. Ghost Warrior can have its cake and eat it by blending Splinter Cell-style stealth tasks with long-range shooting puzzles.
This works because the hurdles required in each mission type feel quite distinct, necessitating adjustments to your tactics and equipment. Long-range sniper rifles, for example, cannot be muted, therefore dealing with guard patrols requires the employment of additional weapons and equipment. You won’t be able to sneak past either, because any guards at an overlook point will converge on your position the instant you fire your first shot. Light sniper weapons used in classic contracts, on the other hand, can be hushed, allowing for additional choice when you snipe.
The superb presentation is carried through to the writing and voice acting. Contracts 2 isn’t a jingoistic exercise in self-aggrandizement the way Call of Duty has become. It depicts contract killing and military intervention in the Middle East in a chilly and darkly sarcastic light. The game is completely transparent about your role in keeping oil prices high and Western economies afloat, an objective that leads to an amusing twist later in the game. On the lighter side, Contracts 2 features some hilarious guard banter. They speak about their pets, grumble about being henpecked by their wives, and wonder aloud if they’re video game characters.
A few peculiarities from previous Ghost Warrior games remain, most notably in the save system and enemy AI. Contracts 2 contains an autosave system that disables itself while you are in conflict or near an enemy. It’s an overly complicated method that could be easily avoided by simply allowing gamers to quicksave. And the AI desperately requires a state in-between “passive” and “every guard in the vicinity knows exactly where you are.” Stealth games are much more enjoyable when you have the opportunity to fix a mistake, stop a guard from sounding the alarm, or phone in an alert. It’s more infuriating than exciting to see entire bases light up when you miss a single shot.
